Today With The Brothers Tsarnaev

If Dzhokhar Tsarnaevreally was unarmed during the shooting along Franklin Street in Watertown last week, then we have a whole 'nother kettle of borscht to deal with up here.

Two U.S. officials say the surviving suspect in the Boston bombings was unarmed when police captured him hiding inside a boat in a neighborhood back yard.

Authorities originally said they had exchanged gunfire with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (joh-KHAHR' tsahr-NEYE'-ehv) for more than one hour Friday evening before they were able to subdue him. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation, say investigators recovered a 9 mm handgun believed to have been used by Tsarnaev's brother, Tamerlan, from the site of a gun battle Thursday night, which injured a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority officer. Dzhokhar was believed to have been shot before he escaped. The officials tell The Associated Press that no gun was found in the boat. Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said earlier that shots were fired from inside the boat.

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If this is true, then the official story takes a hit, and so does the universally applauded performance of Ed Davis. The Washington Post has the same information, and adds a very plausible explanation for why the shooting broke out.

Law enforcement officials described the 30 minutes before the arrest of Tsarnaev as chaotic. One characterized it as "the fog of war" and said that in a highly charged atmosphere, one accidental shot could have caused what police call "contagious fire. Officers from several agencies gathered around the Watertown house as darkness fell. The FBI was in charge of the scene, but there also were officers from the Massachusetts State Police, local police and transit police. "They probably didn't know whether he had a gun," said one law enforcement official, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. "Hours earlier, he and his brother had killed a police officer, shot another officer and thrown explosives out of their cars as the police were chasing them. They couldn't assume that he did not have a gun and more explosives." The FBI declined to discuss the exact sequence of events that led officers to open fire on Tsarnaev's hiding place and whether the dozens of bullets that struck the boat caused any of his gunshot wounds.

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That I can buy. There were not just guns along Franklin Street. There were a lot of guns along Franklin Street. There were a lot of jumpy cops all over the city. It was less than 24 hours after Dien Bien Phu had broken out a few blocks away. However, fire control is fire control, and this case would have been a terrible mess had the younger Tsarnaev died, unarmed, in that boat. Moreover, the Alex Jones crazoids — who, apparently, include most of the Clan Tsarnaev — are bughouse insane anyway. The folks in Glennbeckystanstan aren't much better. Imagine the screams from those monkeyhouses if neither suspect lived, to say nothing of what might come from the more opportunistic congresscritters who already are circling. This could have been much, much worse.